- The Fight to Spread Life
- Posts
- What would your descendants need to remember about you? Part II
What would your descendants need to remember about you? Part II
Who let us in? Who gives us access?
Ray Doraisamy
January 08, 2026
In some way or other, most of my childhood friends were connected to Penang Adventist Hospital, a 200-bed medical institution.
My father built boats, but he was on the board.
Other friends had parents who were ambulance drivers, nurses, radiology techs, pharmacists, clinical administrators, dentists, electronic health record techs, medical equipment maintainers, and so on.
There were more than thirty of us born between 1982 and 1992.
Only two of us avoided ending up in the medical field.
Though I suppose I was a medic at one point.
Which is something that struck me, when I joined the military. There were so many things I didn’t know that I wish I had known, that kids from military families knew.
Little things that added up to big things.
Typically, parent-child correlations in socioeconomic measures are in the range 0.2-0.6. Surname evidence suggests, however, that the intergenerational correlation of overall status is much higher. This paper shows, using educational status in England 1170-2012 as an example, that the true underlying correlation of social status is in the range 0.75-0.85. Social status is more strongly inherited even than height.
Over 842 years, social status was largely immune to regime changes.
When education became a marker of status, families maintained access to Oxford and Cambridge.
…even if a parent and his child never live together at the same time (and thus never interact with each other), there is still a significant correlation between the educational achievement of the father and the son because of peer effects, i.e. the son is exposed to the same (educational) environment as his father.
Looking at over thirty-seven thousand families, twins, siblings, adoptees, and all, there’s a gap that doesn’t directly include nature or nurture: network.
Who they know.
Where the family lives. How much wealth they’ve made over the years. Who people choose to have children with.
…our findings suggest that the majority of the indirect genetic effect in academic achievement, though not necessarily all of it, does not arise within the nuclear family, but instead reflects processes shared across families with common grandparents…
So what do your descendants have to remember, for this?
Who gave us access, and who to learn what from.